Insights gleaned from two years of fighting a brutal counterinsurgency
in Iraqi cities are being folded into the Army’s strategy
to prepare for the next war.
Although senior officials assert that the Army does not intend to
try to learn “how to fight the last war,” the lessons
from Iraq will continue to underpin military planning for the foreseeable
future.
A stark illustration of this trend was a war game conducted last
month at the Army War College in Carlisle Barracks, Pa., where officers
representing the armed services and allied countries played out
a scenario designed to both capitalize on the Iraq experience and
engage in an intellectual debate on the limitations of U.S. military
power.
The war game, called Unified Quest 2005, benefited from an unprecedented
show of military brawn, in the form of a panel of seasoned Army
officers who commanded U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. Among
them were Lt. Gen. David D. McKiernan, Lt. Gen. William Wallace,
Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, Lt. Gen. Dan K. McNeill, Maj. Gen.
Peter W. Chiarelli and Maj. Gen. Martin E. Dempsey.
The panel, known as the “senior observers group,” provided
expert advice throughout the game, a multimillion-dollar effort
supported by several hundred active-duty and retired officers.
The scenario pitched a U.S.-led “Blue” coalition invading
a fictional Eastern European Muslim country, called Redland, circa
2015. Blue’s actions were aimed at overthrowing Redland’s
government, which possessed nuclear weapons, and replace it with
a Blue-friendly regime.
What unfolded was a campaign that was part conventional warfare,
part unorthodox “asymmetric” combat of the sort now
seen in Iraq.
The notion that wars can be won quickly and painlessly has been
banished from strategic planning, explained Clement “Bill”
Rittenhouse, war game division chief.
The campaign in Unified Quest starts in 2012 and is expected to
end no sooner than 2020. “In past war games, we tended to
look at operations in terms of days, weeks and months. We all know
that is not the case in the dynamics of 21st century warfare,”
Rittenhouse told reporters. “We’ve given ourselves eight
years to work this campaign to achieve strategic objectives.”
Another dimension of the game that parallels current events is
the preponderant role that access to natural resources plays in
the decision-making process.
Redland sits astride a major energy flow from Asia into Europe.
It controls the distribution systems for natural gas and oil from
the Caspian Sea basin. It also holds sway over a large portion of
the electrical grid that supports Western Europe.
The power to cut off the energy supply to Western Europe gives
Redland enormous leverage, said retired Army Lt. Gen. William G.
Carter, commander of the Blue forces.
“We’ve gotten OPEC to increase production, but we have
a global distribution problem because the Caspian distribution system
goes through Redland,” he said. As a result, Blue took action
to increase oil distribution by sea, which prompted Red to launch
missile strikes against Blue ships, commercial tankers and major
European ports such as Rotterdam.
Red’s ability to fire long-range missiles is attributed in
part to the failures of Blue’s air force in destroying Red’s
air defenses. Blue’s powerful air force, Carter explained,
was easily deceived by decoys and wasted thousands of precision-guided
bombs on phony targets.
These events, meanwhile, directly affect the United States, where
the “average American will be pretty upset when gas hits $8
per gallon,” Carter said. “Every country is being affected
by this cutoff of energy to Western Europe.”
In another similarity to what took place in Iraq after U.S. forces
toppled Saddam Hussein, Blue commanders in the war game were unsuccessful
in convincing the local population that they should support the
invading force and its plan to install a more secular and moderate
government.
“Where we have problems is in how do we define the enemy’s
will,” Carter said. “That involves understanding the
culture of the country. We haven’t had success influencing
the population.”
The head of Blue’s information-warfare cell, Navy Capt. Al
Pollard, attributed the failures to the disjointed nature of Blue’s
information campaign. “It’s being done in an uncoordinated
matter … You have psychological operations, deception, operational
security, computer networks. We don’t see coherency.”
Intelligence collection also proves to be inadequate, Pollard noted.
“We are good at counting ships, airplanes and tanks. That
is not enough,” he said. “What you need to do is understand
what’s behind that. We need to know things like the population
reaction. Are we dealing with an insurgency? Is it a friendly population?
Is there a way to drive a wedge between them and the government?”
Blue also bungled the domestic information war, asserted the commander
of Red forces, played by Richard Hart Sinnreich, a retired Army
colonel.
Red sees a U.S. government unwilling to put its public through
any inconvenience or call upon the American people for sacrifice
in order to win the war, said Sinnreich.
Taking a page from the Iraqi insurgency, the Red commanders decided
that the way to beat Blue was to make the war “long and expensive,”
he added. Unfortunately for Blue, its plan was based on winning
“quickly and cheaply.”
Retired Army Lt. Col. Bob Topping, the chief of staff of the Red
force, pointed to another Blue weakness: A blatant move by the United
States to pull together a coalition where it is “using European
allies as its puppets.” Red is banking on the likelihood that
the Blue coalition eventually will fall apart.
Like insurgents in Iraq today, Red is aggressively targeting Blue’s
supply lines. “We’ll generally avoid combat head on.
We take a roundabout approach, attacking their fuel convoys, transportation,
ammunition, things that are not well defended.”
A potential Achilles’ heel for Blue is that its forces are
overstretched in Redland, a huge country with densely populated
“mega-cities,” said Sinnreich. “Blue is trying
to bite a very big apple with a very small mouth.”
The scenario in Unified Quest, in many ways, was designed to set
up Blue for failure, Army officials said, because the point of a
war game is precisely to stress the capabilities of the force. Proof
that the gambit worked was that the Iraq commanders observing the
game told Army planners that the scenario was “too hard,”
said Army Brig. Gen. David A. Fastabend, director of concept development
and experimentation.
The feedback from Iraq commanders was that “we wouldn’t
want to do this,” said Fastabend. “That’s a fairly
typical military reaction. If there is a way to not do this, we’d
prefer to not do it.” That response was welcome by war game
planners, however, “because you want to pose a very difficult
scenario, one that is going to stress your concepts to the breaking
point.”
Past iterations of Unified Quest had featured a fictitious Middle
East country called Nair as the “Red” enemy. But in
a sign that even fabricated war games can become politically sensitive,
the Army nixed Nair in the enemy role, and replaced it with Redland,
to stave off criticism that the game was concocted to help the Pentagon
plan a war against Iran.
“Some said we were conducting ‘pre-war’ games.
But that was not the case,” said Gen. Kevin Byrnes, head of
the Army Training and Doctrine Command.